In my quest to get ruby on rails up and running on all three OSes tat live in my house (windows, mac OSX leopard, linux), I ran into a snag in the install process on Ubuntu 10.04.

Ruby v 1.8.7 was alive and well, however, following the steps at rubyonrails.org, when I tried to update gem:
sudo gem install rails
OR
sudo gem update –system
I received this error:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require’:
no such file to load — zlib (LoadError)

Oddly enough, I received the same error when trying to create a rails app or start the rails server – even though rails *seemed* to be installed. Mysterious!
I had previously installed ruby via the synaptic package manager, gotten the same message, then tried again via sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential, none of which had relieved the issue.
So, searching the googlenet, I came across this post:
http://thoughtsincomputation.com/posts/ubuntu-and-ruby-191-zlib-missing
He had run into the same issue, and noted that the actual missing library was called zlib1g. I checked synaptic, and I had that installed – but, he noted that he had compiled Ruby from source, which I hadn’t tried. So, following his instructions:
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

I then went to http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/ and got the source for version 1.9.2 (since this was the version I’m currently running on windows). I compiled ruby1.9.2 from source, and the problem was resolved.

Notes for myself on learning rails

I set up rails using:
http://rubyonrails.org/download
Everything below here deals with the Windows install – since Tomcat on linux is causing me problems, I’m using windows right now so I can switch between jsp/servlets/php/rails more easily.

After initial setup, I always received this error:

Could not find gem ‘sqlite3 (>= 0)’ in any of the gem sources listed in
your Gemfile.

Eventually Google gave me this solution, which is to specify WHICH sqlite3 gem to use:

gem ‘sqlite3-ruby’, ’1.3.2′, :require => ‘sqlite3′

After which, I ran bundle install and everything went fine.
This is in total contrast to trying to run rails using mysql – both version 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 seem to only want to use mysql2, even after specifying in the Gemfile and in config/database.yaml to use mysql. I would always get this:

Could not find gem ‘sqlite3 (>= 0)’ in any of the gem sources listed in
your Gemfile.

Eventually I worked around this by downloading an older version of the libmySQL.dll (when I find the link I’ll update this) and putting that directly into the Ruby/bin dir. Not a great workaround. An actual ‘fix’ for this seems to be described on this page:
http://rorguide.blogspot.com/2011/03/installing-mysql2-gem-on-ruby-192-and.html – however, this solution is only for a full install of the mysql server on your machine. I use WAMP for PHP dev, so I decided rather than remembering to stop and start WAMP mysql ten times a day, I would just use this workaround:

First, install the DevKit from here:
http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads – make sure to read the docs first.

Then, update the Gemfile in your rails app:
gem ‘mysql2′, ’2.8.1′

Run bundle install.

run rake db:migrate (after rails generate to generate the models. More on this later.)

Following this tutorial:
http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/beginning#top

Notes:
While using the github client for windows, always use git bash. Half of the time, commands work from the windows cmd prompt, but the other half they don’t.
ex: c:\Ruby\rails\first_app>git push origin master
error: src refspec master does not match any.
error: failed to push some refs to ‘git@github.com:jgbarr/first_app.git’

While using git bash remember to cd to the correct directory! After 1st setup (on windows 7), you’ll be in your home directory, where the .ssh dir was created.
Using the git client for windows was pretty painless, so long as I remembered to do things correctly. I ended up with this (github profile: http://github.com/jgbarr/):
https://github.com/jgbarr/first_app

Pretty cool: the Git client for windows, Git Bash, comes with the vi editor, which is much quicker than leaving the command line to click around in folders. Awesome.

I’m experimenting with HTML5 – it’s given me faith that eventually I will be able to develop/design for the web without all the cross-browser nonsense that we all know so well. I doubt the day of full cross-browser compatibility will every arrive, but until then HTML5 is a really exciting advancement in what can be done with HTML and CSS. One day I hope to be able to develop web apps with nothing more than a solid, stable javascript library (jquery is probably the best candidate right now), HTML, and CSS. Until then, I’m putting up a portfolio of code that I’ve written for the web as an accessible resource/demo repository.

Visit my the web development portfolio of Jeff Barr here.

This is one of my more recent completed short stories. I posted it to WeBook.com as part of a small informal writer’s group that has sadly since disbanded.
It’s a Christmas themed love story – enjoy!

Jerry and Me
Read it here on JeffBarr.com